The textbook case of humiliation-attacks on tax collectors is the
“tarring and
feathering” practiced, in particular, by American revolutionaries.
After the revolution, the Whiskey Rebels took up the practice. In one
case:

A party of men, armed and disguised, waylaid [Robert Johnson, collector
of the revenues] at a place on Pidgeon Creek, in Washington County,
seized, tarred and feathered him, cut off his hair, and deprived him of
his horse, obliging him to travel on foot a considerable distance in
that mortifying and painful situation.

On other occasions, the rebels “docked [collectors’] horses’ tails, and in
at least one instance tarred a collector and rolled him in leaves.” One
process server “was seized, whipped, tarred and feathered, and after
having his money and horse taken from him, was blindfolded and tied in the
woods, in which condition he remained five hours.”

A delusional man named Wilson, “manifestly disordered in his intellects,
imagining himself to be a collector of the revenue, or invested with some
trust in relation to it, was so unlucky as to make inquiries concerning
distillers who had entered their stills, giving out that he was to travel
through the United States, to ascertain and report to Congress the number
of stills,
etc. This man
was pursued by a party in disguise, taken out of his bed, carried about
five miles back to a smith’s shop, stripped of his clothes, which were
afterwards burnt, and, after having been himself inhumanly burnt in
several places with a heated iron, was tarred and feathered, and about
daylight dismissed — naked, wounded, and otherwise in a very suffering
condition.”

Violent humiliation attacks known as “carding” were also part of the Tithe
War in Ireland. According to one account:

Carding the tithe proctors (who certainly were the genuine
tyrants of Ireland) was occasionally resorted to by the White Boys, and
was performed in the following manner. The tithe proctor was generally
waked out of his first sleep by his door being smashed in; and the
boys in white shirts desired him “never to fear,” as they only
intended to card him this bout for taking a quarter instead of
a tenth from every poor man in the parish. They then turned him on his
face upon the bed; and taking a lively ram cat out of a bag which they
brought with them, they set the cat between the proctor’s shoulders. The
beast, being nearly as much terrified as the proctor, would endeavour to
get off; but being held fast by the tail, he intrenched every claw deep
in the proctor’s back, in order to keep up a firm resistance to the
White Boys. The more the tail was pulled back, the more the ram cat
tried to go forward; at length, when he had, as he conceived, made his
possession quite secure, main force convinced him to the contrary, and
that if he kept his hold, he must lose his tail. So, he was dragged
backward to the proctor’s loins, grappling at every pull, and bringing
away, here and there, strips of the proctor’s skin, to prove the
pertinacity of his defence. When the ram cat had got down to the loins,
he was once more placed at the shoulders, and again carded the
proctor (toties quoties) according to his sentence.

In 1972, “An irate dry cleaner” named
LaSaunders Hudson “who wouldn’t pay his taxes forced three state revenue
agents to march naked out of his store”

Mabile said as the agents were removing their underwear, Hudson advised
them that “this is part of the punishment we are going to give the white
man for injustices done the black man.”

During the salt tax (gabelle) riots in Bordeaux in
1548, “A few tax collectors were
killed. Their bodies were dragged through the streets and covered in heaps
of salt to underline the point.”

In 1881, Irish settlers in Canada who were
refusing to pay a county tax there were confronted by a deputy sheriff who
had intended to seize property for back taxes. Instead, “they compelled
him to eat the writs he had, and then gave him a limited time to get out
of the township.”

In one town, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, “the moment the
clerk begins to read the document, the women spring upon him, seize the
tax-roll, and ‘tear it up with countless imprecations;’ the municipal
council is assailed, and two hundred persons stone its members, one of
whom is thrown down, has his head shaved, and is promenaded through the
village in derision.”

Sometimes the humiliation attack would be performed on the tax collector
in absentia or in effigy:

During the Tithe War in Ireland, resisters

audaciously dug a grave within sight of Dinefwr Castle, the family seat,
and announced that [Colonel George Rice] Trevor would occupy it by
10 October. Trevor, however,
surrounded by soldiers, survived unscathed.

During the Whiskey Rebellion,

[T]he inspector of the revenue was burnt in effigy in Allegany county,
at a place, and on a day, of some public election, with much display,
and without interruption, in the presence of magistrates and other public
officers.

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